ADP Modernization

Half-Billion Dollar FmHA Effort Lacks Adequate Planning and Oversight Gao ID: IMTEC-92-9 October 29, 1991

The Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) needs to rethink its approach to modernizing its information system. The agency is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to modernize systems that support its loan systems before it has clearly articulated a business vision and supporting information needs. So far, FmHA has concentrated on upgrading the existing technology that supports its current loan-making practices. To help define and carry out a strategic vision and supporting information systems, FmHA should consider forging alliances and cultivating partnerships with experts from government, industry, and academia. FmHA must develop an overall information systems plan or blueprint showing how its information technology projects fit together. A guiding architecture is essential to prevent the modernization effort from degenerating into a loose collection of independent systems. FmHA also lacks an effective process for overseeing the modernization. The absence of effective oversight increases the risk that the current modernization effort--like its two predecessors--will fail, leaving the agency without the information technology it needs to improve its credit management. GAO summarized this report in testimony before Congress; see: Farmers Home Administration: Half-Billion Dollar ADP Modernization Lacks Adequate Planning and Oversight, by JayEtta Z. Hecker, Director of Resources, Community, and Economic Development Information Systems Issues, before the Subcommittee on Conservation, Credit, and Rural Development, House Committee on Agriculture. GAO/T-IMTEC-92-2, Oct. 29 (eight pages).

GAO found that: (1) federal standards state that information system modernization efforts should be based on an agency's long-term business plan, addressing strategy as well as long-term objectives; (2) the FmHA modernization plan does not establish a clear vision of how FmHA plans to operate in the future or reflect current changes in the FmHA organizational structure and loan management operations; (3) FmHA is modernizing its automated systems without an information system plan, and it has not defined its short- and long-term information needs or how those needs can be met; and (4) FmHA has an Executive Review Board responsible for reviewing and approving major information resource management (IRM) projects, but the board has been inactive for over 3 years and the agency is not using the mechanism it established to oversee modernization.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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